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Sara Vidas

Awarded

Sara Vidas

Womenswear collection 'LILI' (diploma work)

Fashion Design

Jury report

The Art of Nonconformity
Why do older peo­ple dress so dif­fer­ently from the young? The Basel fash­ion de­signer Sara Vidas demon­strates that older peo­ple are gen­er­ally bold enough to be dif­fer­ent and to demon­strate a mind of their own. She sug­gests this may be due to hav­ing saved many beloved items of cloth­ing in the course of their lives. For the women's col­lec­tion 'Lili', her diploma pro­ject at the Hochschule für Gestal­tung und Kunst in Basel (FHNW), she care­fully stud­ied how older peo­ple dress. She tried out her de­signs on both younger and older women and ended up cre­at­ing 10 out­fits that clearly sub­vert con­ven­tional ex­pec­ta­tions. Her mod­els are both young and self-con­fi­dent older women. The de­signs clev­erly toy with a cer­tain sense of pro­pri­ety that con­trasts with a some­what dis­con­cert­ing range of colours. An over­sized loden coat, for in­stance, is green, blue and brown with che­quered in­serts. Young or old, it still takes courage to wear a coat like this. An­other al­most grotesquely over­sized coat has con­spic­u­ous, L-shaped black-and-white pat­terns that are rem­i­nis­cent of op art. The de­signs are not el­e­gant in con­ven­tional terms, nor are they anti-de­sign: Vidas's col­lec­tion is some­where in be­tween. She makes es­pe­cially strik­ing use of ma­te­ri­als like var­nish foil, poly­ester, vel­vet, jer­sey, mo­hair, loden, rab­bit fur, lamb­skin nappa and tweed. She cul­ti­vates dash­ing, im­mod­er­ate pat­terns: tiger shoes and gloves com­pete with che­quered stock­ings and a blouse with a che­quered col­lar. Her de­signs os­cil­late be­tween at­trac­tion and re­pul­sion, and her imag­i­na­tively bold 'Lili' col­lec­tion is pep­pered with sur­pris­ing de­tails.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Sara Vidas
Born in
1983
Education
dipl. Dekorationsgestalterin
Vordiplom Style und Design
dipl. Modedesignerin  

Web

www.saravidas.ch

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